Heart

How much can you give? How much do you have? How badly do you want it?

I always hear the term ‘heart’ in sports. How some guy has some incredible amount of heart. Meaning, whether or not he has talent is irrelevant. He gives it everything he has, every time out on the floor or field. And that is what gives him his edge. That is what makes him better. That is what makes him great.

Heart.

Before my wife gave birth, we were forced to go to doctor appointments weekly. Our doctor was on the same floor as a heart clinic. And that clinic posted statistics about the human heart on the walls. In red, cheesy, Valentine’s Day look-alike cut-outs.

But each time we went, I would read them. Word for word. And be amazed. I was actually amazed every single time I read them.

Talk about something with heart…

-Your heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times.

-Even at rest, the muscles of the heart work hard—twice as hard as the leg muscles of a person sprinting.

-In one day, the blood travels a total of 19,000 km (12,000 miles)—that’s four times the distance across the US from coast to coast.

-The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime.

That…is never quit. That…is balls to the wall. Every second of every day. That is getting up every morning and absolutely, without question, getting it done. That is getting it done in your sleep. Better and harder than anyone else gets it done when they are awake.

Some people talk about having a bad ticker. One that only beat 2 billion times. Yeah, I’ll take a bad one of whatever that is, every time.

You think Mercedes Benz makes engines that run forever? How low is your bar?

You already have, within your own body, a muscle that is performing consistently, at miracle-like levels. Some…thing…in you…that comes to play. And has been coming to play. Every day since the day you were born.

So how do you justify not functioning at the highest possible level in everything you do? That questions is rhetorical. Any answer is going to sound like a bad excuse.